Great Barrington — Not often can skilled visual artists dive just as fluidly into a completely different medium: words.
However, Jan Conn and Kathline Carr, whose paintings share an exhibit at Child & Clark Gallery, give apoetry reading on Saturday, June 28 at 5 p.m.
The two friends and Berkshire County residents have their art show “Landscapes for the Anthropocene” at the gallery. The show will remain on view through Wednesday, July 9.
Conn has been writing since she was a child, but she did not start painting until she was 62 years old. “I love to be able to show somebody an image because it’s so immediate and people’s responses are so visceral,” Conn said. “Poetry has something else to it because it has the magic of language.”
Conn’s most recent book of poetry “Peony Vertigo” was published in 2023 by Brick Books. Carr’s poetry book “Miraculum Monstrum” was published in 2017 by Red Hen Press.
Her book interposes art among the poems. “Kathline’s art is just absolutely brilliant for how it captures the slow devolution of the main character,” Conn said. “It’s hard to combine the two so that both of them shine.”
They both said their poetry at the reading would not directly correlate with their paintings. “I’m starting to really think of painting and poetry as two parallel tracks,” Conn said. “Sometimes they cross over but often just proceed in parallel.” “When you try to combine them, you have something that sometimes feels inauthentic,” Carr added. Lately, Carr’s preferred mode has been the prose poem.
“It feels less, and more constrictive in a way,” Carr said. “It’s a different mindset than separating things into the kind of fragments that poems can be.” Carr said that, like her abstract oil paintings, her recent work is landscape-centered. “I can’t help thinking about the landscape these days,” Carr said. “The topic of climate, maybe the most important thing, has sort of fallen off because there are all these disasters happening, and all these laws and regulations are being deregulated and it’s heartbreaking.”
“The climate is like the constant elephant in the room,” agrees Conn, who is a biologist “You can’t always be thinking and writing about it because you go crazy, because there is so much more, some of which is incredibly beautiful.” Conn’s poems in “Peony Vertigo” reflect that ecological sensibility; they are both fragmentary and clear, as lush and intricately patterned as her artwork. Indeed, the paintings in “Landscapes for the Anthropocene” are exuberant and colorful.
In Carr’s paintings, landforms become abstract shapes. “I’ve always loved language,” she said. “Sometimes it fails on some deep level, which is why I turn to images. There’s something hard to articulate about feeling awash in a forest, but I feel this great love that I want to communicate.”
Carr said that she frequently hikes on the Appalachian Trail.
“On the trail, there are these shapes that sort of come at you,” Carr said. “They’re a little disembodied for me and they make me so happy, and I guess I’m still old-fashioned in the belief that I want to convey joy in my work. It’s maybe not the contemporary thing that everybody’s talking about in certain circles of the art world — joy in nature. And also sadness, because people are abusing our wild spaces.”
Conn also hikes regularly, and “can hardly function” without a walk on a trail. “It’s so fascinating how much being in a world that’s slightly wilder feeds so many parts of our psyche, but our bodies need it too, and they notice the difference,” Conn said. “It’s horrifying when you recognize that you’re in this privileged place of being able to choose to walk on a trail.”
Conn paints mostly on wood and paper made from crushed rocks. She said the detailed work she does with acrylic pens would be difficult on regular canvases.
“There’s a quality of painting on wood that I find immensely satisfying,” Conn said. “It feels like it’s connecting me more to the ground.” Like Carr, the land itself intrigues Conn.
While she describes herself as a northeasterner who loves the four seasons, lately, she’s been painting and exploring more of the desert, a landscape she also loves.
“The sparser landscape forces you to look closely at everything because you’re not overwhelmed by these huge amounts of green,” Conn said. Several pieces in the show abstractly depict rocks, canyons, and southwestern types of strata.
Much of Carr’s work imagines cold, glacier-strewn, Arctic landscapes. “I do not have direct experience with the Arctic, but I’m obsessed with it,” she said. “I’m taking courses online learning about the Arctic.”
These paintings, perhaps counterintuitively, are far more colorful than her mostly monochromatic earlier work. Carr said she is “making peace with color,” especially after working in a fiber studio surrounded by it. “I come home and I’ve been looking at this color and that color all day, and I want to try to put it in my work somehow,” Carr said. “Also, I think I appreciate color more as I get older. It feels that it took me forever to develop into a fully formed human. I don’t know what my early thoughts were. Maybe color can be a little scary. There are so many of them and they don’t all work together.”
Conn recalled that in her poetry at one point, she was “relying on color too much as a descriptor.” She trained herself to focus on bringing all the senses into her poems, but then, she said, “I started thinking a lot more about how I can get some of those equivalents into a painting, and that’s way more challenging.” At Carr’s encouragement, she started painting with gouache and noticed how much she could do with texture by combining the matte quality of the gouache with the shiny acrylics. “That was a revelation.”
Both artists agree that the slightest adjustment of texture or color can change everything. “It’s a constant state of flux,” declared Conn. “You think you’re going to do something,” said Carr, “and when you start to do it, it just has its own life.” “This color is the color and you have to put it there,” Conn described. “I will be sitting looking at a painting and all of a sudden something inside says ‘that green has to go right there,’ and I can’t even do it.” Carr agreed she had the “same…compulsion.” Both sometimes get up in the middle of the night to paint. At 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. Carr might realize, “Oh my God, there’s the thing that I’m supposed to do.”
Conn added, “You need to get it down before it disappears; [those impulses] are so ephemeral, but if you get them down you’re so satisfied.”
